Ben Affleck is not worried about AI taking over Hollywood. Speaking to “Squawk on the Street” co-anchor David Faber during a recent interview at this month’s 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha investor summit, Affleck declared that “movies will be one of the last things, if everything gets replaced, to be replaced by AI.”
“AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan. It cannot write you Shakespeare,” Affleck explained after Faber asked if AI is a benefit or a threat to Hollywood creatives.
“The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct…that is something that currently entirely alludes AI’s capability and I think will for a meaningful period of time,” Affleck said. “What AI is going to do is dis-intermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people want to make ‘Good Will Huntings’ to go out and make it.”
Affleck explained that “AI is a craftsman at best. Craftsmen can learn to make Stickley Furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That’s how large video models, large language models, basically work…they’re just cross pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created.”
“Craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop. And I think knowing when to stop is going to be a very difficult thing for AI to learn because it’s taste,” Affleck continued. “And also lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality.”
Affleck used HBO’s “Succession” as an example of AI’s creative limits, noting that the only new episode the series could create using AI would be one that is just a retread of older episodes the AI technology can pull from.
“AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of ‘Succession’ where you could say, ‘I’ll pay you $30 and can you make me a 45-minute episode where like Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy?’ and it’ll do it,” Affleck said. “And it will be a little janky and a little weird but it will know the sass and those actors and it will remix it in effect. That’s the value long-term.”
But can AI create a new series like “Succession” from the ground up? That’s highly unlikely, according to Affleck.
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